reBlog

Current Reblogger: Chloë Bass

Chloë Bass is an artist, curator and community organizer based in Brooklyn. She is the co-lead organizer for Arts in Bushwick (artsinbushwick.org), which produces the ever-sprawling Bushwick Open Studios, BETA Spaces, and performance festival SITE Fest, which she founded. Recent artistic work has been seen at SCOPE Art Fair, CultureFix, the Bushwick Starr Theater, Figment, and The Last Supper Art Festival, as well as in and around the public spaces of New York City. She has guest lectured at Parsons, the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, and Brooklyn College. Other moments have found her co-cheffing Umami: People + Food, a 90 person private supper club; growing plants with Boswyck Farms (boswyckfarms.org); and curating with architecture gallery SUPERFRONT (superfront.org). Chloë holds a BA in Theater Studies from Yale University, and an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) from Brooklyn College.

Asaf sez, "After hanging on to my VHS tapes collection for about 15 years -schlepping them to every apartment I moved - I realized those movies are NEVER going to see the light of day or a screen, for that matter.
So I decided to be kind AND rewind!"

A reader writes, "The person who owned the domain CrackHo.com set it up to redirect to Sarah Palin's website on the Alaska state site. No one used the site, but apparently someone got upset: Palin's lawyers sent a cease & desist, claiming that it was misuse of the Alaskan seal and copyright infringement.

Note, that CrackHo didn't copy anything or use any of the content. It was just a simple redirect to the Alaska website."

We've seen some projects featuring how to draw with light using your camera's exposure settings, but nothing compares to this. This group goes by the name of Light Art Performance Photography and they use lasers, LEDs, illuminated body suits, sparklers and just about anything else which emits light to construct these incredible works of art.

The lights illuminate the northwest campus areas around the dormitories and dining hall. The lights, provided by SolarOne® and Hadco, are powered by photovoltaic (PV) panels, making them completely independent of the electric grid. With their own solar power source, the light posts can easily be installed wherever light is needed, without expensive investments in trenching, cabling and repaving. "We now have a beautifully lit walkway students are using extensively, day and night" said Capt. Allen Hansen, who championed the alternative energy project and is Vice President of Operations at the school. The new lights replace an old assortment of low pressure sodium fixtures and overbearing flood lights, the combination of which left the campus spotty, dark and poorly lit. Instead of adding safety, the old lighting created isolated pools of glare between dark areas. With no underground power conduits, the easily installed PV-powered lights were readily and economically placed along walkways and around the dormitories, which previously had no site lighting....The softer, whiter directional LED lamps provide exceptional clarity and visibility on areas that require light, without sending stray light into areas that are best left dark. The result is an enhanced night time setting, with marked reduction in light pollution and energy usage.

Solar Energy is a great way to get us started on the road to becoming a Renewable Energy Island and help us achieve greater energy independence. Generating power and making hot water on island homes and businesses reduces our contribution to Climate Change, particularly when combined with energy efficiency efforts. Energy generated locally is more efficient because there is less transmission loss.

Editor's Note: This post is part of a series of posts sponsored by GE. GE had nothing to do with the content of the article and no control over Make: Online editorial. -Gareth

Amid protests in the streets and on social networks calling for Guatemala's president to step down after the assasination of a whistleblower attorney, Guatemalan police have arrested a Twitter user for "inciting panic" through tweets. In the capital city today, police raided his home and confiscated his computer.

Quick background: The Guatemalan bank Banrural is at the center of the country's current political crisis: the recently assassinated attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg represented a finance expert, Khalil Musa, who was said to have refused to participate in corrupt transactions involving that bank. Musa, was assassinated in March. After continuing to make statements about alleged government complicity in that murder, and in the financial crimes Musa protested, Rosenberg was himself shot to death this past Sunday. Days before his murder, Rosenberg recorded a video saying he believed he would soon be assassinated by forces acting at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom. After his death, the video spread virally on YouTube, sparking widespread protests on and offline.

Today, Twitter user "Jeanfer" was arrested for suggesting in a tweet that people who had money deposited in Banrural should remove those funds, and by doing so, break the control that corrupt entities have over the state-controlled financial institution.

Below, my clumsily translated snip from a report in the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre about the arrest, which as far as I know is the first time anyone in Guatemala, or Central America, period, has been detained over something they posted to Twitter:

The police today detained Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, an information technology worker, for having incited financial panic on the social network Twitter, after having written this Tuesday a comment on Twitter which called for a united force to take funds out of [the Guatemalan bank] Banrural, as a result of the information transmitted in a video recorded by the attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg before his assassination.

Jean Anleu Fernández, known on the microblogging social networking website Twitter as "Jeanfer," was arrested today during a police raid of his residence in zona 8 of Guatemala City, in which the police took his computers at the order of the Guatemalan government's public ministry division in charge of banks.

The head of the banking system, Genaro Pacheco, told reporters that Mr. Anleu admitted that he made this comment about Banrural on Twitter.

Mr. Anleu Fernández wrote on Tuesday May 12, at approximately 2pm, a commentary ("post") in which he expressed, "The first action people should take is to remove cash from Banrural, and break the banks of corrupt people," along with the hashtag #escandalogt, which is known by Twitter users as a way of classifying posts related to the Rosenberg assasination case.

Discussion of Rosenberg's assassination, and related calls for an investigation and/or removal of Colom from power, continues undaunted on Twitter -- and is easily followed with the #escandalogt hashtag. As one might imagine, there is a great deal of outcry against @jeanfer's arrest today. One Twitterer said just now (translated from Spanish): "The capture of @jeanfer appears to me to be a smoke curtain to divert attention from the accusations against president Colom."

Below, screenshot of another form of online protest: en masse, Guatemalan Twitter users are re-tweeting the comment that led to @jeanfer's arrest.

Being a parent with a young child, there is nothing like the fear you have of losing your child in a crowded mall or worse.

Link Child Locator is designed to help you locate your children location by telling you the distances and direction with its small LCD display.

Unfortunately for this parent, this is a concept design and it doesn’t exist in any form other than these images. Lets hope that some company sees both the opportunity to not only make money with this great idea, but more importantly look at this as an opportunity to help save some children.

Specifications

Child’s bracelet: transmitter module that works at a range of up to 100’

Parent’s watch: receives the child’s signal and indicates its direction and distance on a small LCD display

So often creative-reuse and found-object art has a "junky" quality that's hard to escape because...well, you know, it's basically made from junk. I always applaud the effort to turn trash into treasure, but it's rarely done so well as in the case of these amazing sculptures from reclaimed tires. That the material is such an egregious disposal problem only makes them that much more awesometastic. Via Dude Craft.

A worker at one of AT&T's San Jose offices opened a refrigerator full of rotten, forgotten cow-orker chow and released a gas so noxious that the building had to be evacuated and a hazmat team had to be called in.

Authorities said an enterprising office worker had decided to clean it out, placing the food in a conference room while using two cleaning chemicals to scrub down the mess. The mixture of old lunches and disinfectant caused 28 people to need treatment for vomiting and nausea.

Authorities said the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment -- she can't smell because of allergies.